Nvidia used its Tegra 3 demo at CES to show off Splashtop, a pretty demanding app that enables users to enjoy a proper PC experience on their tablets.

In the demo, an Asus Transformer Prime was used to control some relatively basic PC functions, play media and check Facebook. However, the tablet also proved capable of showing some more demanding stuff, like gaming.

Although we don’t see many users using their tablets to play PC games, Splashtop seems like a pretty handy feature, allowing users to access their media libraries or documents, straight off the PC. Sounds great for people who don’t like getting out of bed. [Everyone then? Ed]

It seems that as with the iPhone 5 rumors the drama surrounding a possible successor to the Xbox 360 is really starting to take on a life of its own, with a number of sources coming out of the woodwork to ping us about what the new machine potentially could be.

When you gather up everything that we have been told, it seems that a lot of momentum is behind a potential announcement that Microsoft is said to be preparing to make at CES in January. According to the rumors, Microsoft will announce the technology that will power the next Xbox, and the company is expected to make this huge announcement during CES. It isn’t yet clear if they will be showing the actual prototype of the machine, but we suspect that this will be the case.

The latest unconfirmed talk has the new console using a hex-core CPU clocked in the 3GHz range, with two GB of DDR3 RAM. The graphics will be powered by an AMD GPU that will offer both more performance and features than the current Xbox 360 GPU.

While a number of stories have suggested that at least some studios might be working on development for the new console, no one is confirming these reports; and those studios that have been indicated in the reports have denied that they are developing for new Microsoft hardware.

We do believe that there is enough evidence to indicate that Microsoft is working toward a new console. What might happen at CES might have more to do with a potential announcement of the future direction of the Xbox platform and what some of the platform’s abilities will be going forward, rather than a lot of specifics and examples that are playable today. It could be that Microsoft will have a second more specific playable unveiling at E3 later in the year.

Rumors are just that; but we have found that when a number of people are talking about the same subject that all of the pieces are there, we just have to put them together correctly. If not, we can wait till January 10th thru the 13th at CES to see what Microsoft might be announcing, or not announcing if that is the case.

Microsoft is apparently working on “cloud-specific” functionality that will be a part of the Xbox platform going forward. While confirmed at GDC China by architect and evangelist Brian Price, he did not reveal much more than that. (He claims that he would get fired if he said much more.)

What he did suggest is that more cloud functionality, including cloud specific gaming, is coming for the Xbox platform. It apparently is already in development and being used in some cases already. It was not clear from the comments if Price is talking about features that will be accessible by the current generation of Xbox, or whether this is cloud functionality that will only be accessible by the next generation of Xbox.

It is believed that the future of the Xbox will be built around the Microsoft Azure SDK, which will allow developers to save things such as game saves and game stats; even possible is resumption of games in the cloud and perhaps even across multiple devices, meaning perhaps a console, web browser, and maybe a mobile device.

Sony has already been experimenting with cloud technology, but so far it has been limited to game saves and only for PS Plus members. Of course, we expect Microsoft to one-up Sony with its cloud offering. The cloud save option was apparently to be slated for the next dashboard upgrade, but right now it isn’t clear if that is still part of the plan or not. It is safe to say that cloud functionality will be a big part of the future for consoles, however.

Last CES we had a chance to talk to some people in know, and we’ve learned that 28nm graphics chips for AMD should be coming this year. What caught our eye was that AMD intern CEO Thomas Seifert revealed that AMD already has working samples of 28nm chips. This comes as little surprise as the retail cards are expected at some point in Q4 2011.

So, Southern Islands should be coming this year in 28nm. Back at CES our sources were quite sure that TSMC is the only graphics provider for 28nm chips and that Globalfoundries was left behind simply as it was too expensive to develop a GPU for two fabs.

Simply browsing over to Globalfoundries website we have found the story that you can read here, and the story talks about 28nm graphics chips, conviniently posted at Globalfoundies website. This gives us an idea that Globalfoundries might be involved in 28nm graphics after all.

Globalfoundries might get some action on 28nm Brazos successors, such as Deccan and Krishna, Wichita and Hondo APU’s, but this was also never confirmed. Brazos was currently being produced only at TSMC.

Globalfoundries annual forum is happening on August 30th so we might get some chance to find out more about its involvement in 28nm bulk GPUs and APUs manufacturing.